Power Word Casual
The pandemic has made streamers out of a lot of us. When my husband began running one-shot Dungeons & Dragons games over Discord, we figured we might as well stream our antics. We were already half way there!
Initial Planning
There are a couple of common approaches to streaming channels: Some focus around a single personality while others focus on content made by more than one person. For Ian and I, the latter was ideal: It would let us both participate to our own comfort level and it didn’t force either of us to make a brand of ourselves. Instead, the channel itself would have a brand and we would do our work under this umbrella.
We came up with some clever names, but many of them were already taken on Twitch, and nobody wants to be xX_coolname_Xx anymore
The Logo
We landed on Power Word Casual, a term that evokes the names of some of the most powerful spells in Dungeons & Dragons and juxtaposes them with “casual,” a word that was once used to describe gamers who didn’t take their hobby very seriously. (That’s us. We casual the heck out of everything we play.)
The logo reflects that playfulness, with “POWER WORD” set in an aggressive font nearly fit for a heavy metal band and “Casual” in script running a circle around it.
A circular logo was a natural choice since most social media platforms (Twitch included) put your user image into that shape. It makes the logo feel like a cool pin-button that you wear on your patch jacket.
I made a motion graphic to mark the occasion and bookend our streams.
The Main Event
The general look of the stream is a constant work in progress, and that’s okay! I’m learning new things every time we go live. More often than not, Ian is in the producer’s chair and I make assets that he can use and modify in OBS.
